By Jack Sullivan

Listen to Joseph Flummerfelt in rehearsal: “Sing the whole line, not your part!” He empowers singers to make the music their own. “You take responsibility for the line; the conductor only shapes it. Follow the line, don’t follow me!” Of course, they do follow him, with absolute fidelity and a respect bordering on idolatry, but the goal of this self-effacing maestro is to make them do what he does—to put the music first. Once the line is intact, he refines and clarifies it, endlessly: “That’s too mushy! That’s too sluggish!” he grumbles, sometimes with a startling vehemence matched only by the intensity of “That’s great! That’s beautiful!” when they finally get it right.

It’s hard to believe that these exuberant voices belong to students who must carry a full academic load in addition to surviving Flummerfelt’s grueling rehearsals and non-stop performances. Westminster, the music school of Rider University, is, after all, a college, located in Princeton, New Jersey, since 1932. It provides a liberal arts education while preparing its students for careers in solo voice, chorus, education, composition, conducting, piano, accompanying and coaching, organ, and musical theater.

For many concertgoers, Joseph Flummerfelt’s leadership of the Westminster Choir in thrilling New York Philharmonic performances under Leonard Bernstein and Pierre Boulez marked the first time they had heard a great choir. Ever since, most others have sounded a little muddy, a little churchy. The Flummerfelt-Westminster sound is impossible to mistake: young voices surging with vitality, but refined to a purity that makes them seem like one.

Flummerfelt has been conducting since his own student days at DePauw University and has been playing piano and organ since his childhood in Vincennes, Indiana. His father was a funeral parlor director, an occupation that provided his son with lots of organ gigs; his 90-year-old mother, who sees him at Spoleto every year, is still an active piano teacher. At Florida State, he directed the Florida Festival Singers and was soon working with Robert Shaw, who in 1968 brought him to conduct the Atlanta Symphony and Chorus in Ives’s Harvest Home Chorales. It was Shaw who steered the Westminster Choir in Flummerfelt’s direction. “I remember sitting in Robert’s living room in Atlanta in 1970,” Flummerfelt recalls. “He came in and told me Westminster was on the phone: They were interested in me; was I interested in them?”

The rest happened with breathtaking speed. Flummerfelt took over as artistic director and principal conductor of the Westminster Choir in 1971, an extraordinary year in which he was brought to Spoleto USA by Gian Carlo Menotti, prepared the chorus for Liszt’s Faust Symphony under Bernstein, and received a Grand Prix du Disque for his contribution to the recording of Messiaen’s Transfiguration de Notre Seigneur Jésus-Christ with Antal Dorati and the National Symphony. Hailed by Bernstein as the world’s greatest choral conductor, he was soon appearing with the New York Philharmonic in Berlioz’s Te Deum, Bartók’s Cantata Profana, and other choral-orchestral works that marked some of the high points in the Boulez era. Six years later, he became Director of Choral Activities at Spoleto, and since 1979 he has served informally as chorus master for the Philharmonic. Westminster was soon the choir of choice for the Philadelphia Orchestra and New Jersey Symphony as well. The chorus now appears with many major orchestras, including the National Symphony, the Berlin Philharmonic, and the Royal Concertgebouw, and has made over 45 recordings, including a stunning Beethoven Ninth and Britten War Requiem with Kurt Masur and the New Yorkers and a Brahms choral collection hailed by The New York Times as among the best Brahms recordings ever released.

Flummerfelt has not always remained behind the scenes, conducting orchestra as well as chorus in performances with the Philharmonic, the New Jersey Symphony, and especially the Spoleto Festival Orchestra, obtaining with instruments the same impeccable balances and surging lines that he gets with singers. A Haydn or Mozart Mass under his baton combines mystical rapture with lightning speed; his Chichester Psalms are even more bracing and sweet than Bernstein’s own. Flummerfelt sets the bar high for everyone: Emmanuel Villaume, music director of the Spoleto Festival Orches- tra, has said that his goal is to “get the orchestra to sound as good as Joe’s choir.”

The only problem with all this, say Westminster Choir seniors, is their fear that after graduation everything will be downhill. Indeed, fear combined with adulation is a common response with Westminster singers (who refer to him affectionately as “Flumm”). “I was scared to death, and I loved it,” says the noted mezzo-soprano Jennifer Larmore, who graduated in 1980. “He taught me to be serious and care deeply for the music, to listen to my colleagues and to be a true professional. I will never forget the man who taught me so much.” Fellow mezzo Nancy Maultsby, who graduated from Westminster in 1986, explains that “He wants you to get to the emotional crux of a work.” She still carries “his philosophy with me everywhere I go.”

Critics have been known to write that a concert came alive only when a Flummerfelt chorus came to the fore. But when the stars
are all aligned, as they were last June in a New York Philhar-
monic performance of Mahler’s “Resurrection” Symphony un- der Lorin Maazel, the results are riveting all around. On that evening, the choir blended so uncannily with Maazel’s orchestra that the players were like singers, the singers like instruments. Indeed, Maazel later commented, “Conduct- ing a Flummerfelt-prepared chorus is like driving a Rolls just back from a tune-up in the only honest garage in town.” As is often the case, the choir received more thunderous applause than anyone else, even though the audience doesn’t always seem to recognize who Flummerfelt is when he wanders out on the stage for his curtain call.

This June, after 33 years, Joseph Flummerfelt is retiring from Westminster. The time has come, the 66-year-old maestro says, “to open up space in my life to allow other possibilities to emerge.” When a great musical institution loses a long-standing director, the artistic legacy usually endures. Still, it is as hard to imagine the Westminster Choir without Joseph Flummerfelt as it was the Chicago Symphony Chorus without Margaret Hillis or the Atlanta Sym- phony Chorus without Robert Shaw. There is a synergy, an indivisibility that will be hard to reach beyond.

He will continue to be a strong presence in our musical life, both at Spoleto and as conductor of the New York Choral Artists, which he founded in 1978. When he assembled the latter with Masur and the Philharmonic on a moment’s notice for a cathartic Brahms Requiem to mourn 9/11, it became clear that he was New York’s choral conductor, not just Westminster’s.
Conductor of the Year? In the world of choral music, that could be just about any year for Joseph Flummerfelt.

Jack Sullivan is author of New World Symphonies: How American Culture Changed European Music (Yale, 1999), among others, and is currently writing about music in the films of Alfred Hitchcock for the same publisher. He teaches at Westminster Choir College, the music school of Rider University.